Chapter VII

In that lost and lonely tomb
They may find her;
Find the arms that ached with rapture,
Softly folded on a breast
That for evermore is silent;
Find the eyes no longer wistful,
Find the lips no longer singing,
And the heart, so hot and wayward
When that ashen land was young,
Cold through all the mists of time,
Cold beneath the Lesbian marble
In the low-roofed room
That drips with tears!

THE WILD SWANS PASS

In the dead of the night
You turned in your troubled sleep
As you heard the wild swans pass;
And then you slept again.

You slept--
While a new world swam beneath
That army of eager wings,
While plainland and slough and lake
Lay wide to those outstretched throats,
While the far lone Lights allured
That phalanx of passionate breasts.

And I who had loved you more
Than a homing bird loves flight,--
I watched with an ache for freedom,
I rose with a need for life,
Knowing that love had passed
Into its unknown North!

AT NOTRE DAME

I

O odour of incense, pride of purple and gold,
Burst of music and praise, and passion of flute and pipe!
O voices of silver o'er-sweet, and soothing antiphonal chant!
O Harmony, ancient, ecstatic, a-throb to the echoing roof,
With tremulous roll of awakened reverberant tubes, and thunder of sound!
And illusion of mystical song and outclangour of jubilant bell,
And glimmer of gold and taper, and throbbing, insistent pipe--
If song and emotion and music were all--
Were it only all!